Thread by @owenbroadcast

heres the best relationship advice i ever got

not sure if i have posted it before

some guys in the 40s - 60s came up with the idea for a modified version of the english language called e prime. the main modification is removing all forms of the word “is”. [...]

so thats “are”, “were”, “be”... you can think of it as any form of that word that declares what reality is. “that movie [was] bad” (was is one), “you ARE a good skier”. the idea behind this was removing the ability to assert your perception as a fact, to make it true verbally.

when you say, “that painting IS good”, you are declaring your subjective perception as a fact. in e prime, you cant say that, you can only describe how the painting affects you. this painting makes me feel good. this painting makes me think of home, my wife, my dog.

a note to make here is that if someone says “this book IS bad”, someone can argue that. who are you? prove it. you kind of cant. however no one can argue with the statement, “i didnt like how this book reads, it makes me feel off and strange”. that is just true, its a fact.

so, how does this apply to relationships. i picked this up around ten years ago hanging around “weird idea” people, and since then, i have noticed that many many fights in relationships stem from this. off the cuff i might say most casual fights (at least).

said another way, many fights in relationships eventually revolve into attempting to semantically define or determine if one persons subjective assertion about reality is true which is actually not possible, so it goes nowhere. some examples:

a: “you always leave your dishes in the sink”

b: “no i dont”

a: yes you do, i put them away at lunch and breakfast

etc

pause. now these two people are fighting about if “you always leave your dishes in the sink is a true statement”. by what metric? its subjective.

person B is correct in saying it is not literally “always”. but person A may be correct in that it is enough times to merit casually using the term always. how would we know? are we going to count? this sounds stupid but actually many many fights are like this.

person B is probably not going to say they “always” do that because, they feel like they dont. maybe they dont. so now two people are arguing about the definition of always without realizing it and getting crazy heated and this is unproductive. whats the alternative.

lets use e prime.

“honestly, i hate how the dishes situation makes me feel”.

“i feel like i am often stuck doing dishes”.

“thinking about the dishes and the system we have right now really stresses me out”.

these are all objective factual true statements.

they also get right to the actual issue, and do not force the other person to capitulate to your perception of reality. if your partner tells you that, its just true. okay, thanks for telling me. what can we do about it. this actually really works.

like i said after picking this up i noticed that this is, well u could say it either way, the cause of or the wall that many many fights couples get in hit + they dont know how to go around it because they dont realize what theyre even arguing about + both people feel invalidated

sometimes i will even use this to pull back from a fight and refocus like, “okay, you think im mad about XYZ, i feel like im not mad about it, i dont really want to litigate about if im mad or not, the issue is...” and you can just bypass this unproductive stage.

like i said sometimes i think most fights are either about this or spiral out of control because of it. this concept has greatly assisted me in many ways whether it is phrasing things or hearing someone out or just not getting stuck in the weeds + therefore i now pass it on to u.

note

https://twitter.com/naithwoods/status/1494864327173718017